By filming the vibrations of a bag of chips, scientists can now re-create ambient sound. | Abe Davis, et al./MIT
“Mary Had a Little Lamb” has once again made aural history. More than 130 years after Thomas Edison shouted the song to his tinfoil phonograph, making the first human voice recording, researchers from MIT, Microsoft and Adobe recorded the rhyme using the world’s first “visual microphone” — an empty bag of potato chips.
Just as a song’s bass thumps in your chest at a concert, Mary’s lamb caused minute vibrations — just tenths of a micrometer — in the chip bag. While our eyes can’t see the tiny vibrations, the team’s high-speed camera, placed behind soundproof glass, could. By analyzing only the bag’s tiny shakes, they reproduced the whole rhyme, the scientists announced in August.
Theoretically, with most cameras and this general technique, you could leave Doritos in your friend’s ...
